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Weird pricing of Dropbox Pro

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Re: Weird pricing of Dropbox Pro

#131
post #54

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Don't move to Australia then. Software prices are routinely jacked up for us. At least with conversion to the euro, there's a large amount of laziness in it. With Australian software, we're often paying 50% more to double the price. At one stage it was cheaper to buy Photoshop by flying across the Pacific ocean, buying a copy in the US, and flying back to Australia.

Every time I see this I feel compelled to point out that Europe gets it worse than you, despite your complaints. Say 100 AUD for a game. That's roughly 70 euro (which is the cost of a new PS4 game in Ireland). The median household income in Australia is 66k (AUD) or 47000 euro. The only source I can find for a median income in ireland states it at around 27000 euro. The purchasing power of an Australian in that case…

Median income isn't the whole story. Disposable income is a better story (particularly for entertainment), and Ireland in US$24k, Australia $31k. In Germany (the most populous European country that no-one questions is in Europe) it's US$30k. France is US$29.5k. (stats from OECD). Norway, with the same size population as Ireland, is more than Australia at US$32k. Australia isn't really as far ahead of Europe as you paint it. Picking one of the poorest countries in Western Europe and using that as the baseline isn't really playing fair.

These links have the country's median household disposable income listed in the first paragraph.

  http://www.oecdbetterlifeindex.org/countries/ireland/
  http://www.oecdbetterlifeindex.org/countries/australia/
  http://www.oecdbetterlifeindex.org/countries/germany/
  http://www.oecdbetterlifeindex.org/countries/france/
  http://www.oecdbetterlifeindex.org/countries/fill-in-the-blank-here-or-just-click-on-a-flower/

Re: Weird pricing of Dropbox Pro

#132

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No import taxes on laptops or cell phones in the EU.

My hypothesis has always been that Apple charges the whole country-wide infrastructure (retail, marketing, etc.) on products, while in US (where it would be harder/impossible to split nation-wide efforts from world-wide efforts) this is not being done. This also accounts for different prices in different European countries; e.g.: the cost of making business is very high in Italy (high salary taxes, high network costs…

> My hypothesis has always been that Apple charges the whole country-wide infrastructure (retail, marketing, etc.) on products

There's no Apple retail or marketing in Belgium.

Re: Weird pricing of Dropbox Pro

#133
post #38

If you are in Europe I recommend hubiC instead of Dropbox. They are much cheaper and have servers in Europe (France - they are child company of OVH). Dropbox only has servers in America [1], so its slower. - 25GB free - 100GB 1€/m - 10TB 10€/m Yes you read that right, its TEN TIMES the space of Dropbox Pro, for the same price. Im not affiliated or anything, just a satisfied customer. [1] - https://www.dropbox.com/hel…

they should really have a tier between 100gb and 10tb. something along the lines of 500gb for 4eu / month. i'd happily buy that

Re: Weird pricing of Dropbox Pro

#134

Earlier quoted context omitted.

For services like Spotify you do have to account for different delivery costs they may have in Europe. Bandwidth is more expensive over here (partly because it just is, and partly because in many places we are not as well served so it is a more contended resource) which they will have to factor in. There may be differing costs for payment processing too, and if they have any sort of tech support and documentation the…

Bandwidth is cheaper in Europe. See the Cloudflare article recently. Also, regarding i18n for Europe: most of the time, it is localized only for FIGS (France, Italy, Germany, Spain). Other 20 or so (for EU, not Europe) countries get shown a finger. So why should they pay for that?

It would appear that my knowledge on relative bandwidth costs is either very out of date (or was just plain wrong to start with)...

On internationalisation: fair point on those that don't get the effort, though some effort being made is better than none.

Re: Weird pricing of Dropbox Pro

#135

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The whole area of VAT in the EU, for companies like Dropbox, changes on January 1, 2015. Dropbox will not be able to state that they don't pay VAT in the EU after this date as the rules will have changed. They will have to start paying VAT based on where their customer is located in the EU, e.g. German Dropbox customers will have to pay German VAT (19%). Hungarian Dropbox customers, meanwhile, will have to pay Hungar…

How will that work for the companies? Will each company have to register and remit payment to every country in the EU that they have customers for?

The affected companies will have two options. Register for VAT in each EU country in which they have sales, or avail of what is called a mini One-Stop Shop, commonly known as MOSS. MOSS, effectively, allows a company register with one EU tax authority for the filing of all their VAT. That tax authority will then distribute the VAT due to other EU member states. MOSS will eliminate the need to register in every EU member state that an affected company has sales (could be all 28 of course). For some clarity try these sites: http://www.hmrc.gov.uk/posmoss/ http://blog.taxamo.com/moss-system-eu-vat/ http://ec.europa.eu/taxation_customs/taxation/vat/how_vat_wo...

Re: Weird pricing of Dropbox Pro

#136

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How will that work for the companies? Will each company have to register and remit payment to every country in the EU that they have customers for?

I'm interested in how this would work. Where would the VAT go in the case of a German person who primarily lives and works in the UK? Is it based on their IP address at the time of signing up? Or where their banking address is registered? EDIT - Just found this, which suggests it's up to the company themselves to decide in which country the service is being 'consumed', and they need to store evidence which shows how…

Correct, the burden of proof is on the company that is supplying the electronic service. But it is not that they 'decide'. They need to collect required types of evidence (that do not conflict with each other) in order to prove where their end customer is. Accepted evidence includes the customer's IP address; their fixed landline; their mobile phone SIM card country code; and credit card billing address. VAT is based on where the service is 'consumed'. That German person who resides in the UK will have to pay UK VAT on any electronic service that they consume in the UK. There are a whole host of other rules if that person goes on holiday in the EU.

EDIT: If some of the evidence above 'conflicts' with the other, e.g. UK fixed landline but a German credit card billing address, then more evidence will be required until the merchant is satisfied as to the customer's precise location.

Re: Weird pricing of Dropbox Pro

#137
post #38

If you are in Europe I recommend hubiC instead of Dropbox. They are much cheaper and have servers in Europe (France - they are child company of OVH). Dropbox only has servers in America [1], so its slower. - 25GB free - 100GB 1€/m - 10TB 10€/m Yes you read that right, its TEN TIMES the space of Dropbox Pro, for the same price. Im not affiliated or anything, just a satisfied customer. [1] - https://www.dropbox.com/hel…

hubic syncs to my pc everything uploaded to it. assuming I have 10tb of files hosted on it, does it mean I need 10tb of hard disk space to keep them synced? kinda defeats the purpose of having so much storage online..

Re: Weird pricing of Dropbox Pro

#138
post #106

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's too pat a response: - You don't know that Dropbox does. - You don't know that hubiC doesn't turn data over to their government or whether it's shared with allies. - You don't know whether either of them have bugs which can be exploited by a MITM – or will in a coming update… Government spying requires political changes to establish a culture of oversight and accountability. You're fooling yourself if you think…

>You don't know that Dropbox does. They've certainly given me no reason to think they don't, and enough circumstantial evidence to believe they probably do. We know for a fact they are targeted by the NSA, because they were specifically mentioned in the PRISM documents as the probable next target for cooperation with that program. So they're on the NSA's radar, and everyone knows it, and they know everyone knows it.…

> They've certainly given me no reason to think they don't, and enough circumstantial evidence to believe they probably do. We know for a fact they are targeted by the NSA

Quite true, also very different from the claim I was responding to. We have no reason to believe that they're willingly cooperating beyond what the US government has the power to compel.

> They spam HN with their stupid blog posts, and when somebody brings up the privacy issues, the poster gets downvoted, and Dropbox goes silent until their next blog post about whatever wonderful technology they've developed to make it easier for the US government to snoop on your data.

Alternative theory: people get downvoted for repeating uniformed conspiracy theories.

> It's not like providing a service like Dropbox and providing provable security isn't a solved problem.

Actually, it is. Anyone who understands security can explain to you both the usability tradeoffs which those security changes would by necessity entail and, more importantly, how none of this matters in practice given the threat in question. They could spend a ton of money making their product more secure and harder to use and in practice it would have no effect on a nation-state level threat which can either compromise your system with an automated MITM attack or compel a US company to ship a trojan update.

This problem requires a political solution, not magical thinking about technology.

Re: Weird pricing of Dropbox Pro

#139
post #138

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>You don't know that Dropbox does. They've certainly given me no reason to think they don't, and enough circumstantial evidence to believe they probably do. We know for a fact they are targeted by the NSA, because they were specifically mentioned in the PRISM documents as the probable next target for cooperation with that program. So they're on the NSA's radar, and everyone knows it, and they know everyone knows it.…

> They've certainly given me no reason to think they don't, and enough circumstantial evidence to believe they probably do. We know for a fact they are targeted by the NSA Quite true, also very different from the claim I was responding to. We have no reason to believe that they're willingly cooperating beyond what the US government has the power to compel. > They spam HN with their stupid blog posts, and when somebod…

>Quite true, also very different from the claim I was responding to.

Not really, you just quoted one part and are acting as though that's my entire claim. If you're just going to strawman my arguments here then, fuck it, I don't want to talk to you. Like I said, it's circumstantial evidence, since their cooperation would have come after the Snowden documents were released, but it's still evidence. We know they're being targeted, they have people on their board who love this shit, and their silence - in stark contrast to most other PRISM targets - is deafening. Again, this isn't a court of law, the burden of proof is lower, and if you're not open about what you're doing, then it isn't unreasonable to assume you're in bed with the bad guys.

This isn't birther or truther or whatever else, conspiracy theory territory. I'm not making any leaps of tortured logic here, so don't paint me with the same brush. It's pretty straightforward and at any rate, all I said initially is that they hand over data to the US government. You appear to agree with me on this after all, you're just giving them more benefit of the doubt with regard to their level of cooperation.

Just to be clear, let's draw a distinction between mere complying with NSLs to the extent required by the law, and cooperating with the NSA on these illegal spying programs. They are not the same thing, and Dropbox is likely doing the latter. Yes, they certainly receive NSLs like anyone else, and some level of cooperation is required by law, but they are also likely to be designing their systems with ease of access for the NSA in mind. It is not unreasonable to think the NSA has automatic access to their data. Other PRISM targets have been pretty open (at least in comparison to Dropbox) about what their cooperation entails, what they are required to do, and what steps they take to safeguard their data. Dropbox has been utterly silent, and that's the most damning thing. Perhaps this would not be a fair conclusion to draw, had they not made the utterly stupid and incomprehensible decision to allow Condoleezza Rice to join their board of directors, but they did, and it is.

No, you are foolish if you think Dropbox is not giving their customer data to the NSA. That's nothing but wishful thinking. Absolutely foolish and naive. Much more so than if, in 2012, you thought the NSA wasn't snooping on emails, et cetera. At least back then the scale of what they are up to would have been something of an extraordinary claim - that's not the case anymore.

Re: Weird pricing of Dropbox Pro

#140
post #138

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> They've certainly given me no reason to think they don't, and enough circumstantial evidence to believe they probably do. We know for a fact they are targeted by the NSA Quite true, also very different from the claim I was responding to. We have no reason to believe that they're willingly cooperating beyond what the US government has the power to compel. > They spam HN with their stupid blog posts, and when somebod…

>Quite true, also very different from the claim I was responding to. Not really, you just quoted one part and are acting as though that's my entire claim. If you're just going to strawman my arguments here then, fuck it, I don't want to talk to you. Like I said, it's circumstantial evidence, since their cooperation would have come after the Snowden documents were released, but it's still evidence. We know they're bei…

Again, we have no evidence that there is willful cooperation. You're free to think that and it certainly isn't beyond the realms of possibility but so far all of the public data suggests that the only companies which are cooperating above the legal compulsion level are the phone companies who sold access to private fiber.

You keep talking about circumstantial evidence but there isn't just anything beyond Condoleeza Rice joining the board and, while I'm less than thrilled about that, rich politically well-connected former Standard provosts do end up on corporate boards for reasons other than mass surveillance.

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